The General Secretary does not golf. When Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, assumed control of the Communist Party, in 2012, golf was a popular pastime for wealthy dealmakers. But in an effort to restore the image of public servants, which had been damaged by reports of corruption, Xi closed hundreds of courses and barred members of the Party from playing the game using public money. So, on Thursday, when the Chinese leader pays his first call on President Trump, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach, he will not be replicating the experience of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who gave Trump a putter as a gift and recently played a round with him at Trump International, his nearby course.
Xi might be doing Trump a favor: taking some time away from the golf course, to consider the global economy and the threat of nuclear weapons, might be wise. As late-night comedians have noticed, our new President is golfing, on average, every five and a half days—twice as frequently as President Obama, whose love of the links Trump often mocked. (“Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter,” he tweeted in 2014.)
But Trump’s first China summit may well push the White House off its game in more complicated ways. China occupies a prominent, but loosely defined, place in Trump’s world view. As a candidate, Trump rarely delivered a speech without accusing China of abusing the United States with unfair trade practices and by depressing the value of its currency. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he told a crowd in Indiana. Although many experts can cite cases of unfair Chinese trade and investment practices, Trump’s portrait of systematic exploitation was misleading. Between 2003 and 2012, for example, the state of Iowa nearly quintupled its exports to China. Its exports to the rest of the world grew barely a quarter as fast. Like Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and refugees, his campaign statements about China succeeded because they conveniently claimed that the struggles of hardworking Americans had vague, foreign origins.
Last summer, Dan DiMicco, a trade adviser to Trump, told me that, to deal with China, the United States should behave like an aggressive patient at a dentist’s office: “Here’s how the patient deals with the dentist: sits down in the chair, grabs the dentist by the nuts, and says, ‘You don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.’ ” (If that’s the activity on offer at Mar-a-Lago, Xi might actually sign up for golf.) But Trump’s posturing as a candidate on China was always a case of theatre over substance, and his advisers occasionally admitted as much. Sure enough, once he was in office, Trump began acting like a pliable counterpart. He has not put tariffs on imports or branded China as a currency manipulator, as he threatened. When Trump briefly showered attention on Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province, Xi stonewalled him—and Trump’s resolve liquefied, just as foreign-policy hands in China had predicted it would. When Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, visited Beijing last month, Tillerson even recited Beijing’s chosen phrases about “mutual respect” and “win-win solutions.” Why does that matter? It’s roughly the geostrategic equivalent of trying to haggle over the price of a car in a foreign language that you haven’t mastered.
Beijing did not forget the lesson. In anticipation of the summit, Evan Medeiros, an Asia expert at the Eurasia Group, observed that “many in China believe Trump is a ‘paper tiger’ whose focus on short-term gains can be manipulated.” Having concluded that Trump cannot back up his rhetoric, Xi has little reason to accede to Trump’s demands, which include getting China to put more pressure on North Korea to curb its nuclear program. The visitors from Beijing also know that, at some point, Trump will attempt a splashy display of confrontation. But Beijing is not overly concerned. Let Trump tweet; Xi is playing a longer game.
Having sent Tillerson home from Beijing spouting Communist Party mantras, Xi’s envoys have turned their attention to the representative they really care about: Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. From a Chinese perspective, Kushner’s role in the White House is a clannish arrangement that they know well. Many of Trump’s current courtiers may be gone in a year of two, but the members of his family will remain. For a while, China appeared to be preparing to endear itself to Kushner in a way that only it can: Anbang, a financial conglomerate with close ties to the Party leadership, was nearing a deal that would have unlocked billions of dollars to help Kushner save a troubled investment in a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. Last week, the Kushner family announced that talks had broken off, for reasons that were not clear. It’s certainly possible that a surge of negative publicity was making one side or the other uncomfortable.
Not in Beijing’s wildest dreams did they imagine a counterpart with Kushner’s characteristics: trusted by the President, overworked, and undertrained. In addition to his China portfolio, Kushner’s assignments include brokering peace in the Middle East and revamping the United States government. His range of responsibility has become a Washington laugh line. (“Gutter clogged? That’s Kushner’s job. Pants chafing you? Kushner’s on it! Dog need a bath? Call Kush!”) China has not assigned a novice to handle the world’s most complex bilateral relationship, but it will not object if America is inclined to do so.
There is a pattern emerging in the Trump White House. After months of promising to repeal and replace Obamacare overnight, the President took his first sustained look at the issue and pronounced it “an unbelievably complex subject,” telling a roomful of governors, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” He would not be the first President to think that he might successfully wing it on China. In the early days of George W. Bush’s Administration, a reporter asked Bush if the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack. When Bush replied, “Of course,” the reporter looked astonished, and Bush later asked his national-security aide, Stephen Hadley, “Did I say something wrong?” Hadley was polite. “Well, you’ve blown away twenty years of strategic ambiguity,” he said. Dennis Wilder, a former C.I.A. analyst on China and special assistant to the President, told that story recently at the Brookings Institution, in order to illuminate early moves by the Trump Administration. “There are these problems at the beginning of an administration where you come in, you have some views, but they’re not terribly well-founded, and we may be seeing some of this at this point,” Wilder said.
Xi has yet one more reason to arrive at Mar-a-Lago with confidence. As recently as four years ago, Xi and other Chinese leaders fretted, publicly and explicitly, that their people were being seduced by the moral glamour of American democracy—by the openhearted confidence of the “shining city on a hill” and by the ability of a nation founded on slavery to elect its first African-American President. Xi worried that the American example of competence, generosity, and contempt for authoritarianism would, someday, drive his own people to challenge the rule of the Communist Party. Xi has less reason to worry about that today.